MIAMI — Thousands of Cubans are arriving in the United States every month in one of the largest migrations from the island in decades, but a sometimes overlooked policy change during the Obama era is making it harder and more expensive for many of them to obtain legal immigration status.
In the final days of the Obama administration, White House and Department of Homeland Security officials defended the elimination of a special parole policy known as “wet-foot, dry-foot” (which allowed Cubans who reached land to remain, while sending back those stopped at sea) as a response to increasing migration from Cuba, a way to “equalize” immigration policies and ensure that young Cubans who could be agents of change remained in the country.
At the time, Cuban migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border who got an immigration parole — a document good for one year or longer — were entitled to apply for work permits and could easily file for permanent residence under the Cuban Adjustment Act. The 1966 law allows Cubans who have been “inspected and admitted or paroled into the United States” to apply for a green card after living in the country for at least one year.
